This page is not completely up to date since I do not have a
Windows XP platform to test with. I appreciate your comments
and any experiences you wish to share. I would recommend
looking at both these directions and the directions that come
with the distribution. Where there are conflicts, certainly
follow the advice of the people who packaged the distribution.

If you have read this far, I would recommend using the latest,
stable version. If you are comfortable with compiling
your tools from source code, this page probably will not be
much help.

ActiveState.com has very nice Windows installers for the two utility
languages Perl and Python. Ruby-lang.org has a good Windows installer
for Ruby. Even though Active State and Ruby do an
excellent job of keeping up with new versions of Microsoft
Windows, the development of driver modules for popular RDBMS
packages is sometimes out of sync. This is, of course, only
a problem if you want to use drivers that are precompiled
binaries. But again, if you like compiling your tools from source
code, you probably prefer working on an Open Source OS anyway.

c:\mcs5303>perldbi.pl
For Oracle the sum of the first 10 integers is 55
For mysql the sum of the first 10 integers is 55
For mysqlPP the sum of the first 10 integers is 55
For ODBC the sum of the first 10 integers is 55.0
For PgPP the sum of the first 10 integers is 55

As of August, 2004 Active Python 2.3 is the latest stable version.
If you would like to use Python with RDBMS packages follow
these directions

Go to Active State and download
ActivePython-2.3.2-232-win32-ix86.msi (16,687 Kb)

Run ActivePython-2.3.2-232-win32-ix86.msi

After Python is installed you can install specific
RDBMS driver modules

The latest MySQL module is 1.0, but this is not available
as a binary, so ...
Go to The Source Forge mysql-python project and click the
"View ALL Project Files" link to get
MySQL-python.exe-0.9.2.win32-py2.3.exe Then run it.
To check your setup

As of August, 2004 Ruby 1.8.1 is the latest stable version.
If you would like to use Ruby with RDBMS packages follow
these directions

Go to RubyForge and under the "Ruby Installer for Windows"
link, follow the "View ALL Project Files" link to get
ruby181-13.exe (9,664 Kb)
Then run it.

After Ruby is installed you still need some specific
RDBMS driver modules. For maximun flexibility try to use
the RubyDBI-DBD scheme that is similar to the Perl DBI-DBD
approach. RubyDBI comes with the Windows Ruby Installer.

DBD-Mysql does not seem to work with the Windows Ruby Installer.
You can still use the original Ruby MySQL interface.
You need the pure Ruby version that does not need a C compiler.
That is ruby-mysql and not mysql-ruby.
At raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-mysql, get
ruby-mysql-0.2.4.tar.gz and then extract with WinZip to
a folder like c:\mcs5303 and finally install it like this